Taking Pleasure in the Ache

Pragmatics

Pursuing your passion, especially trying to make it your living, is both simple (duh, just do what you love) and complicated (what if you don't get paid for it? what if you run out of clever ideas?). Here are some sites that offer hope and portray passionate missions of several varieties:

• -Here's a delightful visual artist's blog


• -Here's a couple who are passionate about photography, nature, travel, and each other. The result? Camera on the Road


• -Some intriguing ideas in Tensoriana's blog on 100 ideas to enhance creativity

Prose

I started this blog out of pure pleasure. I am feeling maverick, and wanted to call it “My A#s Hurts and I Couldn’t Be Happier”.

Why is my seat sore? Well, besides sitting and writing for my day job, I have spent additional time seated, one night at Starbuck’s, another at Borders Bookstore, writing my heart out doing freelance work. I am not sure when the sea change occurred, but the assignments I have taken on are imbuing me with hope for my freelance writing future. One, like my day job, is medically oriented. But I am writing it on my own time, enjoying the freedom to just write (not attend meetings, not sign off on administrative stuff), and paying off my new computer with the proceeds. The other assignment is refreshingly nonmedical. I am way undercharging but I am loving the less income-friendly payoffs: communicating with my customer on a shared passion, searching for markets, drafting the perfect query letter. This extra, longing-to-stand-up-and-stretch work is giving me the best of natural buzzes. I am doing what feels fulfilling, doing what moves me, doing it to the point of aching, and wishing for more.

This is the honeymoon phase. Full-time freelance writers, those without a regular job and, thus, a regular paycheck, tell me that with freedom comes uncertainty, lack of direction, and this gets to be a strain. But, oh, how wonderful and simple and joyful to just do what you do best, what you enjoy best, and get paid for it. Like the honeymoon Tom and I enjoyed 17 years ago today, the phase of bliss is a necessary foundation for the phase where you have to stick it out. And, just like Tom and I said about our early love, surely there’s got to be a way to make this concept work for the long haul!

A toast, with my brother John's anniversary gift of white wine, to the joy of new ventures and the pleasure of looking back happily on them.